


Breaking Balls and Cracking Skulls

by humblepirate



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Graphic Violence, Griddy’s Doughnuts (Umbrella Academy), Self-Mutilation, Slight Canon Divergence, Temps Aeternalis, The Temps Commission, diner au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-29
Updated: 2019-07-29
Packaged: 2020-07-24 21:17:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20021173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/humblepirate/pseuds/humblepirate
Summary: The graveyard shift has its fair share of weirdos, but it's nothing you can't handle. Until, of course, you meet a strangley articulate teenage boy, and the posse of gunmen hired to eliminate him.





	Breaking Balls and Cracking Skulls

**Author's Note:**

> This is a reimagining of the diner scene from Episode One. That remains one of my favorite battle scenes of any movie/show EVER, and I really enjoyed imagining how it could have gone differently if Five had noticed the person working behind the counter before he left. I don't think I'll be doing anything more with this AU (although anything's possible!), so for now it will remain as a fun one-shot.
> 
> Please heed the archive warnings/tags!! There's some graphic descriptions of violence as well as self-mutiliation (Five taking the tracking chip out of his arm). It's nothing worse than what's in the show but, y'know. Just be warned.

The night shift always brings in the weirdos.

Take, for example, the man who just left. He’d seemed like a normal enough guy when he first came in, sat down and ordered a cup of coffee and a glazed doughnut and asked about the book you’d hastily set down when he entered. The late nights are so boring during the off-season and you’re happy enough to chat with strangers; you wouldn’t be working at a diner if you weren’t.

Things started getting weird after he reached for the salt shaker and started to sprinkle it into his coffee. You’d told him that it wasn’t sugar and he’d just told you that he knew that. Then he’d started asking more personal questions- are you in school, do you often work nights, do you tend to carry precious family heirlooms on your person at most times, do you usually walk home by yourself because the city can be so dangerous at night.

Your creep senses started blaring at that point, and the lies came too easily. Years of honing the details of your fake life in order to stave off persistent jerks. Normally they leave off after you tell them that you’re only working here to get some extra money to support the baby that you and your pro-wrestler significant other are expecting, but this guy doesn’t seem to hear a word of it. That, or the idea actually  _ excites _ him, the creeper. Both scenarios are equally possible, and you’re not sure which one grosses you out more.

When you’re finally sick of the grimy way his eyes don’t leave your hips (your uniform has always been a tad too snug for modesty), you slap his receipt on the counter and pretend there’s an urgent task calling you back to the kitchen. He holds out for about fifteen more minutes before finally giving up. You wait a couple minutes after the front door jingles closed, just to make sure he’s truly gone.

Then the front counter bell rings, and you groan as you mentally prepare yourself to go deal with more people.

Two strangers are sitting at the counter; evidently they had entered at the same time that Captain Creeper left. One of them is an older man with a large mustache, dressed in the peaked cap and denim vest characteristic of a seasoned trucker. The other is a kid, no more than fifteen or so, whom you’d guess is with the trucker from how close they’re sitting to one another, though you can’t spot a bit of resemblance between the two. The boy is immaculate, hair neatly parted and dressed in a crisp private school uniform that you don’t recognize as belonging to any of the local institutions.

You flip your notebook open, pencil poised over the blank sheet, and give them your biggest customer service smile. “What can I get you fellas?” you chirp.

“Chocolate eclair, please,” the trucker says. He reaches for the billfold clipped to his belt.

You nod at the boy. “Can I get the kid a glass of milk, or something?”

The boy leans over the counter and folds his hands in front of him, wearing the tight expression of someone who is used to dealing with idiots. “The kid wants a coffee,” he says. “Black.”

You glance at the trucker, who’s suddenly very engrossed in the sal crystals littering the countertop. You look back at the young man, who gives you a joyless smile that makes your spine go cold.

“Nice kid,” you mutter.

You tuck your notebook in your apron pocket and turn to grab their respective orders. As you slide the mug of black coffee to the boy, who nods his thanks, the trucker holds out a couple of bills.

“I got his,” he says.

“Thanks.” The boy now directs his nod at his companion.

From their behavior, you’re beginning to think that they’re probably not here together. Which makes you wonder-  _ where the hell are this kid’s parents? _ Belatedly, your brain also notes the absurdity of a teenager wearing a private school uniform in a greasy diner at close to one in the morning.

Still, you’re not paid to worry about miscellaneous proto-runaways. Your life isn’t a fucking Norman Rockwell painting.

“Good catch?”

The kid’s voice jars you from your thoughts. Your eyes follow the direction of his nod, which centers on the receipt from weirdo-customer, still sitting on the counter. He’d scribbled his name and number at the bottom.

You scoff and gather up the crumpled bills next to the receipt. He’d shortchanged you, naturally. You put the money in the register and toss the receipt into the trash.

“You should give him a call. Maybe you’d be more cheerful if you had someone to go home to,” the boy says.

You have to exercise some serious bodily control to keep from straight up smacking him. You’ve seen some interesting characters in your time, but this high schooler and his wiser-than-thou attitude definitely tops that list.

“Not likely,” you reply. You grab your book off the back counter. “I think I left my oven on. Holler if you need me.”

As soon as the kitchen door swings closed behind you, you collapse into a rolling chair. Your ratio of weirdos per hour has officially been exceeded. You lean back in the chair and continue reading your book, ready for a well-deserved break. If they really need you, they know how to work a bell.

It’s not long before the front door jingles. You jump up and open the door just the tiniest crack to see the boy sitting there, alone now as he sips his coffee. Thank goodness it’s down to just the one. You let out a long-suffering sigh as you plop back down in your chair.

As soon as your butt hits the cushion, you hear the door sound once more. It’s unlikely that the kid decided to leave in the few seconds it took you to walk across the kitchen, so more than likely it’s another customer coming into the diner. Damn. You’d really been hoping tonight would be more dead so you could finish this book. You toss it onto the desk and heave yourself out of the chair.

Your eyes see what’s happening before your brain can process and translate it into a proper reaction, there are definitely a bunch of people with  _ freaking assault rifles standing in your diner _ .

The logical thing would be to duck back into the kitchen where there are infinitely more secure places to hide, in addition to a phone which you could use to call for help. Your brain is kind of stuck on the “assault rifles” part, though, so there is only so much processing power left to feed your survival instincts. You hit the floor moments before the first shots ring out.

It’s the loudest thing you’ve ever heard. Gunfire ripples throughout the room in short, stuttering spurts, underscored by the sounds of shattering glass and tearing metal. The lights begin to flicker violently, giving the effect that everything is moving in uneven bursts like a movie with the framerate all fucked up. There’s a wet tearing noise and then a spray of blood coats the donut display in shiny red.

Oh,  _ fuck _ \- the boy! You’d been so absorbed in saving yourself that you’d completely forgotten about him. Poor kid just wanted a late-night cup of coffee. Now, when the sun rises, he’ll be nothing but a pile of gore cooling on the filthy floor tiles.

Your breath is coming in noisy, rattling gasps, echoing along with the gunshots in your ears and you bite down on your lower lip to stifle the sounds. They can’t know you’re here or you’ll join that strange boy in the list of casualties in tomorrow’s paper. Will the story make the front page among the litter of corporate scandals and economy collapses sprinkled across the newsprint? Will they dig up a photo from your high school graduation, print your name (age in parentheses) in stark black font, maybe a quote from your boss about what a hard worker you had been? Or will they just shove you into the pigeonhole of “unnamed employee” as they toss your remains into the trash heap of countless other anonymous victims?

This line of thinking is only getting you worked up. Focus, you have to focus on staying quiet and staying  _ alive _ . Your nails dig so hard into your thighs that they leave bloody crescent-shaped marks. Breathe, breathe, focus on breathing (quiet) and you’ll stay alive. Don’t think about how any moment one of them could walk around the other side of the counter and your life would be over by the time the bullet exits through the other side of your skull. Breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe.

The gunfire suddenly stops, but the room isn’t any more quiet. Instead you can hear faint cries and the damp sound of metal ripping through flesh. Part of you prays that it’s the police who have somehow been miraculously alerted to the attack and have come to subdue the gunmen, but you know that’s just a fantasy.

_ Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. _

You’re so focused on breathing through the panic that it takes you a few moments to realize that the room has fallen almost silent. Almost, because you can make out soft, calculated footsteps, then the scuff of metal on linoleum.

Slowly, like you can’t fully control what you’re doing, like you’re just watching yourself do it, you stand up on trembling legs and peek over the counter.

You didn’t have any idea what you might see there, but the strange boy from before sitting in one of the stools, a tourniquet fastened just below the rolled-up sleeve of his immaculate uniform and cutting into his arm with a frighteningly long dagger is not a possibility that you would have considered in ten thousand years.

It’s impossible to tear your eyes away as he sets the dagger down and  _ reaches into the wound _ . A sudden bout of nausea rushes up your throat and you clap a hand over your mouth to keep from vomiting. The sound rings out like a shot in the silence.

He looks up just as his fingers locate their target. Without looking at it,  _ without a change in his expression _ , he plucks a blinking thing that looks like a long pill out of his flesh.

“Shit.”

The syllable has only just stopped echoing in the flickering room when there’s a scuffling sound and a low groan. A brilliant blue-white flash fills your vision, temporarily blinding you, but you can still see that the boy is now standing on the other side of the diner, at least twenty feet from where he’d been sitting two seconds ago. Before you can say or do anything, he’s leaning over to grab the head of a fallen gunman just barely clinging to life. In the next moment there’s a nauseating  _ crack! _ and the man collapses, head twisted at a horrifying angle.

It is then that you realize that the room is covered in dead bodies. Bullet holes in their foreheads, cutlery protruding from vital appendages, deep slashes across spilled-over veins, limbs bent in ways that human bodies were not meant to be moved. They lay in a scattered heap of debris, broken glass and dangling light fixtures among their spent rifles.

There’s another flash, and then the boy is right beside you. You jump and open your mouth to let out a scream, but he stifles it with a surprisingly firm hand over your mouth.

“Quiet. I’ll explain later,” he hisses.

Questions bottleneck on your tongue in their hurry to escape, the most prominent being  _ What the ever-loving fucking shitballs is going on? _ But before you can find voice to free them, the boy is tugging you by the wrist out of the diner and into the neon-lit night. He lets go of your hand and drops the blinking pill thing into a storm drain.

Your feet stutter to a halt at the edge of the curb like a battery that’s run out of juice. The chilly March wind whips your apron around your waist.

He pauses a few feet away and turns. His expression is unreadable, though it seems much too old to belong on a face like his. “You coming?” he calls.

You stare at him. Your heartbeat is somehow racing faster than you’ve ever felt and also echoing a slow, steady rumble in your chest. The flickering lights inside the diner are reflected in a puddle on the concrete, sorrowfully normal. A sign that there is a world that happens outside of what you just experienced. Not a new reality, but a mirror of it, both inside and opposite at once. An echo chamber of contradictions and juxtapositions.

The boy does not wait long. With a shrug, he straightens his tie and whirls around on skinny legs, stomping away across the street. Whether you follow or not is of no consequence to him; this is his reality, not yours. He is the protagonist of this story, and you can choose to be either an unlucky bystander or a reluctant sidekick.

How strange to think that twenty minutes before, your most pressing dilemma was avoiding a lone creep hitting on you at work. Now you’re presented with the option of following another one into the cool city night.

You could pretend this is normal. You could turn around and walk back into the kitchen, call your boss and the police like you’re supposed to and wait around to give them your witness statement. You could go home for an uneasy night’s rest knowing that you’ll have to plan for temporary unemployment in the morning. You could walk downtown the next day and see the incident splashed in bold black print across the newstands. You could watch people go on with their lives not knowing or caring what happened or that you were there when it did, and eventually you could find a new job and this night would become just a footnote in the otherwise unassuming tale of your boring life.

You could do all that.

But you  _ don’t want to _ .

“Hey!”

The boy doesn’t turn around, but he does slow his pace just a bit to let you catch up. You walk half a beat behind him and ask no questions as he leads you away from the sputtering wreckage of your former life. With every step you can feel it falling farther behind, your new reality emerging in the velvet shadows sliding over your skin, and you take a slow, careful breath, your first one since leaving the diner.

It feels like freedom.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this story, I'd really appreciate some kudos/shares! I also have a bunch of other TUA fics so if you like my writing and want some more, feel free to check out my other works! If you have any comments, constructive feedback, or requests, please feel free to leave a comment or you can message me on Tumblr at humblepirate! Thanks so much for reading and I hope you have a fantastic day <3


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